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Flu Dreams (Like Fever Dreams, But Without the Fever)

3:34am* Driving home late one evening and getting lost off the interstate, turning down a road with signs to an Italian restaurant but seeing only the neon signs, stopping at a house and finding three beds, lying down and falling asleep only to wake when a woman came in with her grown son who seemed to be have some difficulties, trying to decide whether to let them know I was there, but not wanting to in case they made me leave because the bed was so comfortable.

4:15am Driving with my sister to the airport to catch a flight to go visit our mother, being forced off the road by construction (no signs, just trucks in the road spreading asphalt), ending up in a bus station, helping an old woman who had fallen, who then called out, "Nona Dale," thinking how odd, that's my mother's name, and finding the old woman was calling to my mother, who was getting on a bus to travel cross country. "Oh, Mom, why didn't you tell us you were coming through Chicago?" "Oh, I just got the tickets and there wasn't time!" Watching my mother get on the bus and the doors closing, telling my sister we should just go back home, we'd certainly missed our flight.

4:30am Going to dinner with my husband and one of my junior colleagues and his wife and another person against whom I have a particular grudge, sitting talking about the mask that my colleague's wife had made, standing up and leaning over the person against whom I have the grudge and spitting in her hair (dyed purple and blue), leaving the table to go to the ladies' room and finding it downstairs, decorated like a Turkish bath but with no actual bath, just lots and lots of confusing fixtures, none of which were toilets, which was probably a good thing since everyone knows what happens when you do find a toilet in a dream.

4:43am Leaving the restaurant and getting caught up in a turnstile where a man demanded euros to let me through, telling him didn't he know who I was, but he didn't care, finding my coin purse but no coins, just a carved ornament of some kind of animal, going to the store to look for more ornaments, getting caught up in a crowd and seeing the thin young man who played Jesus in the passion play although I couldn't remember which one buying ropes with funny faces on them like beads, talking with the young man and enjoying his smile, wondering why he was painted blue across the mouth.

Comments

Um, what happens in a dream when you find a toilet? The only potty dream I can remember is from when I was pretty little, and dreamt that when I went to the bathroom all my intestines cam out, and lay coiled in the porcelain glistening like threaded jewels. Yah, I was pretty messed up as a kid...

I know from the Facebook groups I belong to that many of his followers take Jordan as a kind of spiritual advisor, some would say guru. They spend thread after thread discussing how to live out his sayings.

Which would be fine.

If not for the fact that some of his sayings go directly contrary to the tradition in which he purports to be speaking.

I know, I fell for it, too. In Jordan’s powerful words:
Don’t underestimate the power of your speech! Now, Western culture is phallogocentric. Let’s say it... It is predicated on the idea of the Logos. The Logos is the sacred element of Western culture. What do…

One has just left this post on my own Facebook page about yesterday’s blogpost:
Another shameless post of mind-reading and armchair psychoanalysis with a bit of shock language thrown in for drama and clickbait. And unless you’re suggesting that a boyhood playground tussle is similar to a crucifixion your example of Mary is histrionic to the point of absurdity. If one were to play this same game directed at you they would say this is an example of an Oedipal Mother defending her sick need for her son’s dependence. That would be wrong to do of course—just as wrong as your misguided and unfounded attack that you have cloaked in fake compassion.
This is not a friend whom I know in person; she friended me almost exactly a year ago because she liked what I had said in Milo’s defense. She is much less happy about my re…

To be liable to being considered a heretic, my Facebook friends insist, you need first to declare yourself a believer, and it is not clear whether Peterson thinks of himself in those terms or not. One interviewer calls him “a devout Christian,” to which implied question he is quoted as answering, “Yes.” But when another interviewer asked, “You call yourself a Christian?,” he responded, “I don’t; other people do.”

Certainly, it is possible that he does not know the answer himself; he would most likely reply, “It depends on what you mean by believe.” But to judge from the responses my blogposts about him have been getting, many of my friends have been drawn to his lectures on the psychological significance of the Biblical stories as much by the thought that he is making Christianity if not great, at least interesting again, as …

The convener of one of the Jordan Peterson Facebook groups that I participate in has been pushing me for some time now to be more compassionate towards our professorial “father.” Or, as my friend puts it: “to take off your fencing gear and model the Nourishing Feminine.”

Okay, then, but I have to warn you. It is going to hurt.

What do I see when I look at Jordan Peterson with a mother’s eyes?

I should preface my reflections with the caveat that I speak here not just as the mother of a son, but also as an historian. Reading the textual accounts left by people about their thoughts and emotions is what I do in my scholarship. Just as Jordan has spent the past thirty years as a clinical psychologist, I have spent them as a reader of texts,* my goal as an author being to help the texts speak to audiences for whom they no longer mean anything. I have practiced listening to my texts just as Jordan has practiced listening to his patients, and I hope that I have been able to hear.

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“You grasp my soul, and topple my enemies with it. And what is our soul? A splendid weapon it may be, long, sharp, oiled, and coruscating with the light of wisdom as it is brandished. But what is this soul of ours worth, what is it capable of, unless God holds it and fights with it? Any sword, however beautifully made, lies idle if there is no warrior to take it up.... So God does whatever he wishes with our soul. Since it is in his hand, it is his to use as he will." -- Augustine of Hippo, Exposition of Psalm 34 (35),trans. Maria Boulding, O.S.B.

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“The best way to pray is: stop. Let prayer pray within you whether you know it or not. This means a deep awareness of your true inner identity.... By grace we are Christ. Our relationship with God is that of Christ to the Father in the Holy Spirit." -- Father Louis, alias Thomas Merton